Predictions Of The Future

When I was in graduate school studying Economics decades ago there were two names that were most prominent: Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. It was the early 1970s, and revolution was still in the air, so Marx was more popular with students. For me it was simple. In Marx’s landmark Das Kapital (Capital) he showed how Capitalism contains the seeds of its own ruin, becoming increasingly monopolistic until declining profits result in system collapse. It seemed pretty obvious then, and seems even more obvious now.

As popular as Marx was among the students, he was largely ignored by the faculty, who were focused in various ways on making Capitalism work. There were two approaches to advancing this agenda, Monetarism – controlling the money supply, and Keynesianism, the use of taxation and government spending to stimulate the economy in recessions and depressions and slowing it down in times of rapid expansion. It is the art of balancing boom and bust. Keynes's renowned work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money introduced his ideas in great detail.

There was one Marxist on the faculty, Art Ford, and I suspect that a few others were compatible with Marx, but not in any dedicated way. Monetarism, personified in the ideas of the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, was largely debunked and ridiculed, somewhat unfairly, but Friedman was a free-market extremist, and had an annoying and arrogant personality.

Though Keynes espoused an approach that was credited with ending the Great Depression and getting Allied countries through World War II, he ironically echoed Marx, saying at one point "In the long run we’re all dead," though perhaps not with the same meaning as Marx. It is kind of a moot point now. The U.S. Government no longer practices taxation and spending to balance the business cycle, and instead only deficit spends, lowering taxes for political reasons while increasing spending for similar reasons. Keynes would be rolling over in his grave, were it possible.

For me it took a biologist, Barry Commoner, to transcend all these competing ideas. He was a Marxist (I knew him. He told me this personally.), but predicted the demise of Capitalism from a resource perspective, that the depletion of petroleum reserves would cause innovation to decline, resulting in profits to fall to zero. What sealed the deal was a class I audited in economic growth theory, which was all imaginary equations, no reality. The system could grow forever because various equations based on nothing say it can. In the long run, according to these equations, we just keep having more and more ad infinitum.

Commoner, author of The Closing Circle, died in 2012, well-before our current malaise. Like Karl Marx, he didn’t live to see his prediction come true. Also like Marx, he didn’t have much of a plan for what came after. It is one thing to look at what is and deduce what it is trending towards. It is quite another to predict or advocate for something for which there is no evidence beyond one’s imagination. Marx imagined Communism, a form of social organization that has appeared only in name. Commoner’s easy answer was a vague utopia of Socialism.

I don’t have such a rosy view of the future. If we survive as a species there may be pockets of mutual, ecologically integrative, humble clusters of people, but the mass system, with its concentrations into nation-states, is through. It has led to what we have now, and the secular trend, as economists say, is towards ill will, xenophobia, escapism, fanaticism, corruption, chaos and violence. As we have seen in the last couple of centuries, this violence can often descend into genocide, such as today in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,  Indeed, right here in the U.S.A., as European settlers grew into masses, genocide against the unmassed indigenous populations followed as automatically as night follows day.

Whatever humans exist after the fall of mass civilization, they will have to contend with what we leave behind: plastic waste of various kinds everywhere, a plethora of poisons, a warmed climate that devastates life as we know it, extinction of more and more species, extremes of weather and depletion of resources.

This is uncharted territory. Anyone who claims to have a chart for the future is a fraud. What we can do, though, is summarize the things we can’t do, which is most of what we are doing now, and hope for the best. We can start with ending gratuitous war and fascism.

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Here's a song. Here's another.

R.I.P. Dickey Betts. My favorite Allman Brothers song. This instrumental features Betts in an interwoven rhapsody with Duane Allman, especially at 27:10. Donovan's original of this tune can be heard here.

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Barry Commoner also wrote likely the best analysis of our fossil fuel addiction, The Poverty Of Power. Here's an interview with Studs Terkel, where he discussed the book. It is previewed here.

A recent interview with William Robinson on Madison's WORT discusses the crackdown on free speech on U.S. college campuses.

A Long Downward Path

I remember well the day of September 11, 1973. It was the day the Nixon-Kissinger inspired, planned and funded coup d'état that overthrew the elected government of Chile. The president of Chile, Salvadore Allende, shot himself in the head rather than be captured by the coup plotters. This was at a time when investigations of Richard Nixon were closing in on his criminality in the Watergate scandal, where he was attempting to spy on Democrats, among other things.

Having served in the U.S. Army for three years during the Vietnam War, I was well-aware of the deceit and malevolence inherent in our country’s interaction with the rest of the planet. People don’t matter in this complex equation of evil. What matters is power. Go along with our program or go into the Great Beyond. I knew intuitively that Nixon and Kissinger would do here what they did elsewhere, if only they could get away with it. Nixon was my commander-in-chief for most of my time in the Army. I had deep understanding of what he and his crony Kissinger did to the people of Vietnam, and to their ecosystem with their poisons.

Watergate slowed things down for a while, but things picked up with the election or Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Cold War resumed in full murderous malevolence. Reagan used various elements in the kit-bag of American hegemony to subvert democratic uprisings in Central America. The CIA, the State Department, military "advisers," the U.S. Treasury, and of course compliant corporate news media – all were harmonized in a symphony of evil to subvert democracy wherever it encroached on U.S. power.

Just for practice, Reagan invaded the helpless little island of Grenada, calling it an outpost of Cuba. He funded an insurgency based in Honduras to engage in terrorism against neighboring Nicaragua, whose Sandinistas overthrew our client dictator Somoza. He sold weapons to the revolutionary government of Iran to fund his "Contras," a mercenary cadre of terrorists.

Then came George H.W. Bush, who invaded Panama for practice, and followed that up with a full-scale invasion of Iraq, having found sufficient reason. Our "allies" were easy to bring along with the ruse, providing both military and diplomatic cover.

Not much went on during the Clinton years, a kind of holding-in-place while plans were being brewed. It was necessary for the "Republicans" to win the 2000 election, and, by hook or by crook, they did "win," saved at the last minute by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Out of nowhere, it would seem, came another September 11, this time in 2001. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were too easy. Too easy because they were made too easy by active negligence. To exact gratuitous revenge we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which country was party to the attacks. For both countries the invasions and occupations resulted in nothing but carnage and bad luck.

 

During the Obama years our shenanigans consisted mainly of inertia in Iraq and Afghanistan, military offensives against the Iraq war-generated ISIS, drone attacks in Yemen, and arming various regimes like Saudi Arabia and other clients around the world.

And, of course, Israel. Billions every year - weapons of the worst kind and gobs of money. The reasoning for this, such as it is, is partly for domestic politics, partly for the military-industrial complex, and partly to have a proxy bully in the Mideast.

It worked, sort-of, for decades. The game started changing with the end of the Cold War, creating a power vacuum, and a new arch-enemy needed to fill the void. With "911" the War on Terror provided enough of an enemy to have a few invasions, and of course plenty of weapons manufacturing, gun-running and fear-mongering.

The applecart got upset with the ascendency of Donald Trump, traitor and trouble-maker. It hardly ever gets mentioned, but Trump is almost certainly under Kompromat from Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. Putin fully intends to recapture all the satellite countries lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Trump, a man with no morals or scruples, was the perfect tool to weaken the U.S. as a countervailing power.

Trump also inflamed tensions in the Mideast, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, reducing aid to the Palestinians, and assassinating Iran’s most powerful military official. Trump moved the U.S. closer to Saudi Arabia diplomatically, and cancelled the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, restarting the country’s atomic bomb program.

We know well the perfidy of Donald Trump. He is a 100% criminal sociopath, a man with no redeeming qualities, except for the perverse cult-like influence he has over his followers, which is about 21% of the U.S. population. Because he professes to be a "Republican," his popularity magnifies to close to half the voting public, at least in our mass media's totally accurate and reliable polls.

Joe Biden, a 100% politician from politician Central Casting, defeated Trump in the 2020 election, and was well on his way to being reelected, but events overtook, as they inevitably do. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 of last year didn’t just cause Israel’s brutal prime minister Netanyahu to respond with carnage. It upset the entire hegemonic structure of the Mideast, ending for good any credibility either the U.S. or Israel had in the region, and likely destabilized and set in motion the demise of the various kingdoms, dictatorships and authoritarians we prop up throughout the planet.

The presidential election is November 5. We have Trump, the deranged criminal sociopath and traitor versus the weak and empty stock politician Biden. Both of them very old. I am between them in age, and can attest to the difficulty it has to be to be the president of the United States. I am amazed that I have lived this long, and I don’t have the burdens of murder, treason, complicity in genocide and other criminality to weigh me down. 

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be either of these two terrible human beings. I don’t have to. What I can do is oppose both of them in whatever legal way I can. It isn’t much. Voting, writing, donating what little I can. Beyond that I trust the Law of Karma, the generally accepted principle of antecedent and consequence, that what is sown is eventually reaped. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just."

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As Andrew O'Hehir, editor of Salon, put it, we are a blind, blundering colossus on a downward slide.

A recent interview on Madison's alternative radio station covers the decline in some depth. Here's the article it is based on.

The New York Times did a retrospective on the Chilean Coup on its 50th anniversary last year. It has some harrowing pictures from that day. 

Some news: A new report shows how Israel is using artificial intelligence to indiscriminately kill civilians in Gaza. An interview with Yuval Abraham, the reporter who exposed the practice was shown on Democracy Now, April 5. The Guardian reports on the program in depth. The story also appears in Gizmodo.

In other news, an Israeli doctor says Palestinian prisoners are routinely having amputations from handcuff injuries.

Palestinians describe their experiences here.

Update, April 12: Surprise of surprises, the Israeli claims of massive and grotesque rapes by Hamas invaders on October 7 of last year were all lies. It was discussed yesterday on Madison's WORT (The interview also can be accessed here). The guest, Arun Gupta, also wrote an article for Yes Magazine that details his research. His writing also appears in The Intercept, where his expose of American corporate media consistently repeat discredited Israeli propaganda as truth. Biden unhesitatingly repeats these lies as truth. He insists he saw pictures of beheaded babies. If he lies about the genocide in Gaza, he lies here when it suits him, which can be any time about anything. We should insist that he, Genocide Joe, resign, not just for the good of the country, but of the planet.

A freedom flotilla will be headed to Gaza soon.

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Here's a song. Here's another.  Another from Sam Cooke. One more from Sam Cooke. The Byrds. Donovan. Buffy Sainte-Marie. John Prine. John Lennon.  Barry McGuire. Bob Dylan. The Grateful Dead. Another from the Grateful Dead. Ben Harper.  A theme song for Trump. Here's what happens when the Law of Karma is violated. Encore by The Grateful Dead. Or the Clash. We will see in the coming days how The Law wins.